5 Tasks Your Business is Spending Too Much Time On

As your business grows, so do your responsibilities. Tasks that can easily be handled in-house or manually when your company consists of three people can become overwhelming once you have 10 people. If you’re used to simply coping with incremental increases in workload, you may not realize how much time you spend on administrative and repetitive tasks until you’re overwhelmed.

Record the time you spend on manual processes. You might be shocked.

To know what should be automated or outsourced, ask yourself a couple of questions. First, ask yourself which tasks you are most likely to put off until the last minute because you hate doing them. Then honestly ask yourself about which tasks you’re just not good at. Everyone has tasks at which they excel and tasks the make a total mess of, so don’t feel bad. Tasks on these lists (especially tasks that appear on both lists) are the ones you should concentrate on either automating or outsourcing. Here are 5 tasks that businesses frequently spend too much time on.

1. Payroll

Payroll is demanding and complex, and it’s one of the most commonly outsourced tasks. Payroll services are often reasonably priced, especially when you consider the cost of, say, a tax reporting error. Make it easy to gather information to send to payroll by creating custom online time reporting logs. They can be automatically routed to the proper approving authority, and then turned over to the payroll service for fulfilment.

2. Social Media Management

Many businesses figure that social media can simply be squeezed in between other tasks, but that’s only true if you want a social media presence that’s inconsistent, lackluster, and doesn’t do your brand any favors. Hiring a social media manager or outsourcing it can ensure consistency and solid brand-building online. If you want your employees’ ideas and suggestions for social media posts, create an electronic submission form for your social media manager to work with.

3. Mileage Reporting

If you have employees who work in the field, you know how big a hassle manual mileage reports are. Make mileage reporting electronic and mobile-friendly, and your drivers or other field workers can enter mileage data easily after each job. Forms can be automatically sent to designated recipients, so you don’t have to worry about paper mileage forms being lost or illegible. Accuracy and efficiency should both improve.

Paper mileage logs are error-prone and inefficient, both for drivers and those who process them.

4. Business Travel Planning

When it was just you and your business partner, arranging business travel wasn’t that big an issue. But now that you have 12 people, most of whom have to travel occasionally, automating as much of your business travel planning as possible pays off. Create an electronic form employees can use to fill in where they need to be and when, plus other relevant information, and your travel administrator has a much more organized approach to arranging travel.

5. Correcting IT Problems

A very small business may simply rely on whoever is “good with computers” to deal with common IT problems like balky printers or login problems. But this rapidly becomes inadequate as you add more employees. Standardize how people request IT help through an online form, and your IT team won’t lose handwritten requests or spend half their time playing phone tag to find out what’s wrong. A haphazard approach to IT services wastes money and time.

Conclusion

Automating just for the sake of automation won’t help your business that much. You want to automate tasks that will create a positive return on investment after automation. For example, if automating mileage reporting allows your accounting clerk to process 10 mileage forms in an hour rather than five, you’re almost certainly getting a positive ROI.

Investing in an electronic forms and workflows solution like PerfectForms lets you automate countless business tasks. Using a drag-and-drop interface, you create custom forms and can link them together into process workflows. Your creativity is the only limit on how many ways you can use PerfectForms to make your business run more efficiently. Why not try it out for yourself? You could soon have automated processes that cut down on overhead, improve accuracy, and are reflected on the bottom line.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2015 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.